Back to school

So, this is the last weekend of my ‘summer holidays’. My uni course, bar a couple of last essays, finished at the end of March, so effectively the last few weeks have been my summer. I’m intrigued to find out how I’ll adapt to 9-5 days, but I think it’ll be good for me to have some structure to ease me into life after uni. It’ll be a massive shock, given I’m used to 10 hour weeks, but hopefully I’ll be busy enough not to be intimidated by the long days.

I’m really excited about starting the course now, but I’m also pretty nervous, as obviously it’s a really full-on course, and shorthand frightens the hell out of me… if any journalists reading this have advice, I’d love to hear it… again, my reading is alright for the most part, but there are some outlines I spend ages trying to figure out, before realising it’s actually three words in one outline. I’m sure everyone feels like they’ll never hit the holy grail of 100wpm, but WHAT IF I DON’T?! I know it’s quite unreasonable to assume that now, before I’ve had any proper teaching, but it’s a genuine fear. I really hate doing badly at anything, so hopefully once I’ve started being taught by an expert, it’ll naturally fall into place. It’s also about having the confidence to put down what you have in your head. A few times I’ve tried the dictation exercises in the book, I’ve separated word outlines that apparently should’ve been squashed into a single outline. It’s just little things like that that I think I need to learn from an expert. There’s only so much you can do yourself with this. Also I work quite well under pressure.

I’m going to flick through Law For Journalists tonight, and see if I can get the gist of what we’ll be doing. I head onto The Argus website every few hours to see what’s going on in Brighton, and following The Guardian and BBC Breaking News etc. on Twitter means I get to stay on top of the national news too. The North Korea rocket launch particularly caught my interest, so it was good to see all the news breaking live on Twitter as news of its failure to launch was announced.

I can’t quite believe that on Monday, I’ll be studying properly to become a journalist. I’ve applied for one of the studentbeans.com student writing positions, and although I’m aware they’ve probably been inundated with applications, I thought it was worth a shot.

One last thing – out of interest, would anyone like to be interviewed? In search of some new people to talk to!